“Alice,” Sam said with a father’s consternation. “The first thing Agnim’s minions did was round up everyone they could. Then they went right up this road, right up to the front doors of the castle—”
“Front gate of the castle,” Seth said.
“Fine. Front gate of the castle. And once they got there, they broke through and took the rest.”
“You don’t know that,” I said.
Sam nodded, lips pursed in frustration. “I do, actually. I know it because it’s exactly what I would do.”
I ignored him, walking around a broken cart whose contents—apples, shriveled and rotten—had spilled onto the cobblestone street. My calf muscles burned from the incline.
“Alice,” Sam said, hurrying beside me. “Listen to me, damn you! If I’d attacked this town, I most assuredly would have expected someone at some point to send a rescue ship. And so I would have left a trap. Nothing too extraordinary … just enough to knock my enemies out cold and give them something to think about. I might even post a watch somewhere nearby to retrieve the bodies so Agnim can Corrupt them.”
“Wonderful,” I huffed. We were halfway to the next bend, where the road made another sharp turn and led up to the top of the hill. To the castle’s front gates and whoever was still inside.
“Alice!” Sam reached out and grabbed my arm. I wrenched it away. He held up both hands in surrender. “Listen. You have to stop thinking like a hero. You expect people trapped inside the castle because you’re thinking like a hero. You have to start thinking like Agnim. Know thy enemy.”
“I …”
Crud. I had no retort. He was right—of course he was right. Now that we were standing in the middle of the road with the castle looming over us, everything felt wrong. To my right were the charred, destroyed houses. To my left, down below, was the first row of houses and beyond that, the Leviathan II, its sailors moving cautiously on the deck, looking warily at the town.
Flick and Seth caught up with us, out of breath.
“OK,” I said to Sam. “What would Agnim do?”
The dwarf smiled. “He wouldn’t come here. He would send his minions. And his minions would bring the bodies somewhere safe.”
“If they have a negatively charged weapon …”
Sam nodded gravely. “The townsfolk will awaken Corrupted and under Agnim’s control. And if what you said about the mirror was true, then it means someone knows you’re here. And Agnim is planning for it.”
“Because that’s what you would do,” I finished.
The dwarf smiled. “Now you’re getting it.”
We returned to the dock, following the road farther west. At the edge of the little town, the cobblestones gave way to dirt. The riverbank was steep and clotted with old trees with spindly branches and thirsty, slithering roots that burst from the ground and dove into the water. The clouds above had grown heavier, ready to burst.
“At the least the smell of burnt wood is gone,” Seth said cheerfully.
“You said it,” Flick muttered. He was clutching his pickaxe. So was Sam. Seth held his bow but kept the arrows in the quiver on his back. They felt the same unease.
The road pulled away from the riverbank. Dead trees hugged the edges; none of us was interested in getting too close so we huddled near the center, keeping a fast but cautious pace. None of us said anything but I think we all heard it: a moan, so soft you could have sworn it wasn’t real except that we all looked at each other at the same time with the same mildly anxious look.
The road wound around a massive oak with a thick trunk. Three scrape marks ran across the gray bark, digging in deep and exposing the soft brown beneath. Five thick branches jutted up from the trunk, then thinned out and hung down. A single brown leaf clung to the end of the branch hanging over the road, low enough that I could reach up and touch it. I examined it closer as we passed, surprised to see a little hint of green in its squiggly veins.
“This place is fighting back,” I said. “Look! This leaf could grow if we just removed Agnim’s magic.”
“That would be a totally awesome thing to discuss,” Seth said, “if we could just figure out where that freaky moan is coming from first. You know, just to make sure it’s not some monster heading our way.”
“It’s not just a moan. There’s something else … it sounds metallic,” Flick said. His rosy cheek twitched. “Reminds me of the kind of heavy chain I used for my truck.”
“You used to drive?” Seth asked. He laughed. “Man, I bet you had horrible road rage.”
“Only when idiots were driving near me, boy.”
“Up there,” Sam said, pointing with his pickaxe. He was right: the sound was definitely coming from the edge of the forest, where it looked like the road intersected with another much less frequently used road. There was a wooden post at the intersection and something hanging from it.
“Oh crap it’s a dead body,” Seth said with a gag. He covered his eyes. “I’m scarred for life.”
“It’s a cage,” I said. The dwarfs, obviously not believing I had the eyesight to correctly identify it from so far away, hurried a dozen steps closer, grumbling to one another. They were definitely cut from the same cloth.
“She’s right,” Sam said finally. “A cage. Too small for a human. But …”
“A dwarf, perhaps?” Flick asked, eyes wide. His cheek twitched and his fingers clenched around the pickaxe. “Brother!” he shouted, breaking into a run. “Brother, can you hear me! It’s Flick!”
“Flick, you idiot!” Sam shouted. “Wait!”
I hurried after Flick, drawing my sword and cursing him. Something was wrong here. There was someone inside the cage, legs dangling out and face pressed to the iron bars. But it wasn’t a dwarf. Too small to be a dwarf.
“Don’t get closer!” the figure in the cage shouted in a high-pitched voice. “It’s a trap!”
Flick’s feet landed in front of him; his leather boots slid on the dry dirt. Sam and Seth and I reached him and each turned in a different direction. We were in the center of the intersection.
“Boneheads!” the little man shouted. “Fools! Why would I be trapped here for any reason other than to bait heroic strangers? The very logic of it—”
“Either tell us what’s happening or shut up!” I shouted, keeping my eye on the empty weed-infested road leading north. The road cut through flat land littered with dead trees—nothing out of the ordinary, except the whole land ravaged by magical pestilence thing. From the corner of my eye, I saw the cage shake. The figure was squeezing his little face between two of the iron bars, studying me.
“It can’t be!”
“It is,” I muttered. “Nice to see you, too, Tom Thumb. How’s the dandruff?”
“I thought he was a giant,” Seth said. He was in the process of trying to reach over his shoulder to grab an arrow and was failing at it almost as comically as I’d imagined it in my head. I reached over, pulling an arrow out and handing it to him.
“That was when I was Corrupted, dummy!” Tom cleared his throat and scratched his blond hair. “Hmmm. I suppose I should be a little more polite under the circumstances.”
“Quite the understatement,” Sam snapped. He pulled back the sleeves of his suit. “You’ll be happy to know that the hero is just as pernicious as she was on earth.”
“What’s that mean,” Seth whispered.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just keep an eye on your road. Tom! What are we looking for?”
“A wolf!” he said. “Corrupted by Agnim. They set me here in hopes that my old friend Hans in Luck might show up to rescue me. He’s owes me a few favors, as you’re well aware.”
“Why?” I asked. “What does Agnim want with him?”
“His luck, dumb girl!” He held out a shaky little hand. “Sorry, sorry. Force of habit. Agnim wants poor Hans’s luck. He’s building an army, you know.”
“We know that,” Flick barked. “Where’s the wolf? Help us or I’ll whack you with my pickaxe!”
“Oh, unconsciousness would be preferable!” He fell back in his cage. “Curse that foul wizard or magician or whatever he is! He’s as malevolent as he is smart.”
“There!” Sam said. I turned in his direction—south—where tall dead cherry trees lined the road. “I saw something behind one of the trees.”
“Let me out!” Tom said. “Please! Once I’ve outlived my purpose, they’ll feed me to one of the giants!”
“You mean the ones you betrayed?” I asked. “Or are you referring to the one you slowly ate over a period of one hundred years?”
“Oh, he sounds like he’d make a wonderful addition to our party,” Sam said with more than the necessary amount of sarcasm.
“It was more than a hundred years,” Tom pointed out. He scratched his head again. “So you’re not letting me out? Even though you surely know by now that I’m not Corrupted?”
“We don’t know that,” I said, scanning the trees. “And you don’t know what I know, either.”
“You’re with a couple of dwarfs. Your weapons are glowing blue, which means they’ve been enchanted. Which means you know how to reverse the Corruption. You’re heading west, which means you no doubt stopped in the wonderful town of Riverend, which means you know that it was attacked and yet you continued west, into this dreadful place. Which means you’re trying to stop the Corruption. Which means I can help you.”
“Wait, can we go back a minute?” Seth asked. “Did you just say this little guy ate a giant?!”
“It was out of necessity,” Tom said. “And I’ll have you know I was quite Corrupted.”
A growl. To my left. I turned, scanning the spaces between the fat trees along the road. There was a lot of underbrush—dried, brittle twigs and bushes—but I hadn’t heard the soft padding sound of footsteps.
That growl isn’t accidental. He wants us to know he’s here. Which means …
I turned right just as Tom screamed, sword held out in front of me, only to have it knocked back by a great big gray paw. I dove left before my eyes could even take in the entire scene, letting my brain process as I rolled on the hard ground. The leather straps of my chest plate dug into my shoulders. I got up, awkwardly, searching for my sword.
It was lying two feet in front of me. Right at the feet of a giant gray wolf with tall ears and mangy fur and a patchy mohawk on the top of its head. Its single red eye regarded me for a millisecond before it turned to Sam and Flick, who both swung their pickaxes right at its furry belly. The wolf got on all fours and hopped backward, nearly knocking me right over. I jumped aside, searching the rest of the forest for the other wolf that had growled.
“I’ll get him!” Seth shouted, firing his arrow. It cut through the air like a laser, but missed the wolf’s shoulder by more than a foot.
“Wonderful shot!” Sam shouted, swinging his pickaxe again. The wolf dodged left and snarled viciously, letting drool drip from its jaw. Flick came at him next and this time the wolf moved closer, swatting at the pickaxe and nearly knocking the dwarf off his feet. But Flick didn’t let go of his weapon, and with a red face and a raging war cry, he swung again with the blunt end, thick time connecting with the wolf’s hind leg.
No sparks. Just a really, really ticked-off howl.
“Get your sword!” Tom shouted.
I took a step, then heard the growl again from somewhere to my right. “There’s something in the woods! I can’t—”
“The wolf is throwing his voice, you foolish girl!”
My body lunged forward before my mind had even made a choice on whether to trust him. I reached down, feeling the wolf’s presence so close that an icy shudder numbed my spine. I felt something dig into the leather armor; the force was so strong that I tipped right and rolled, pointing the sword upward.
The next moment happened in one breath. The wolf, nearly ready to pounce, stopped. Saliva dripped onto my sword. Another arrow sailed over his head followed by a “Crap!” Sam and Flick moved up, swinging their pickaxes in unison. There was a bright yellow flash of light and then the wolf was on the ground, breathing slowly, eyes closed.
We all stood there a moment, breathing hard, not another sound for miles.
“Wow,” Seth said. “We just earned a ton of experience points.”
Flick ran over to the wolf, raising his pickaxe. “Another lesson for ya, you mangy bag of fur!” He swung the axe down and an intense spark exploded in the crucial space between the tip and the wolf’s body. Flick flew back, landing on his butt.
Sam helped him up. “Probably not the wisest choice, brother.”
I got to my feet and stabbed my sword into the soft dirt, reaching over my shoulder to test where the wolf had attacked me—the leather protecting my back was torn deep in three long strokes. My side was cramped; I took a few deep breaths to dull the stinging sensation. The fight had only lasted a few minutes but I felt exhausted.
The Corruption. It’s draining us.
“He’ll wake soon,” Tom said quietly, grabbing the bars of his cell. “But without the Corruption. And look!” He pointed to my feet. I looked down, not quite believing it: the ground near my enchanted blade was lighter and richer, like farming soil. I watched as a few blades of green grass emerged and reached toward the sky. “All is not lost yet.”
With one strong tug, I pulled the blade from the ground. The grass shuddered; their color faded to brown.
“Not yet,” I said. “But close.”
Chapter 10
And so, just like that, we had another member of our party. Another little member of our party.
“You know,” Seth said, taking up the rear as we followed the road farther west. “We’re not exactly the most intimidating legion of super-heroes at this point. Two young adults and three little people probably aren’t going to strike fear into the heart of an evil wizard.”
I snickered, then burst out laughing when Flick turned around to give him a menacing glare. It felt good to laugh. This place seemed to naturally stifle good feelings.
“Be careful, boy,” the dwarf said. “None of us have said a word about your inability to hit an eight-foot-tall target at close range with your little bow-and-arrow set, now have they?”
“Touché. Uh, hey … wait. What are we doing?”
Tom Thumb stopped at the edge of the road, where old fat oaks greedily crowded up to the dirt, a few of their thick gray roots surfacing like whales. “We can’t take the road any further. The army is just over the next hill.”
I looked down the road: it followed a long, sloping hill that was mostly free of trees, dipping over the horizon.
“But the trees are scary,” Seth pointed out.
“Everything here is scary,” Flick said. “I’ve nearly wet my breeches half a dozen times already. But this forest is probably less frightening than confronting an army of Corrupted head-on.”
“There’s a cave entrance in the woods,” Tom explained, slipping between two of the trees. We followed him into the forest, keeping our pace at a fast walk while his little legs pushed him into a full-on jog. “I was hiding out there, doing a few experiments to test the physics of this world while I schemed for a way to grow taller.”
“Of course.”
He glanced at me and nodded. “Of course! It’s a big cave system, very vast, with veins that connect throughout this region. This was back before Riverend was attacked, though. And there was little reason to explore too deeply in the caves. I’m not interested in seeking out trouble if I can help it, what with my size.”
The forest thickened. Tall trees with thin trunks stood in clusters, their spindly skeletal branches reaching out to one another over our heads in a concerted effort to block out as much light as possible.
Not that there was much light. The sky was overcast; the sun was nothing more than a brightish spot behind the thick grey clouds.
“Ooooh yeah, this is way better than fighting monsters,” Seth muttered.
“It smells like mold,” I said, kicking aside
a tile of dried bark that had peeled away from the nearby tree. The underside of the bark was populated with fat gray slugs.
“So that wolf’s story ended with a great, big spark, didn’t it?”
It took me a moment to realize Tom was talking to me. “I guess … although his story isn’t technically over.”
“No, more like a chapter, I suppose.” He hopped onto a fallen-over tree, waiting for me to catch up. He scratched his head. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the sparks. Everyone here is protected from death—this spark produced is almost like some kind of force field that short-circuits if someone hits it too hard.”
“So you all have an invisible shield?” I asked.
Tom shook his head. He hopped off the tree. Brown leaves crunched under his feet. “Not exactly, but that’s the easiest way to think about it. I think it will take decades of study to better understand it. But what’s important is that this wolf will wake up, and he’ll most likely wake up a great deal happier than before because he was knocked unconscious with an enchanted weapon. The Corruption will be gone, and I wager he’d be very happy with the possibility of getting a little revenge on the monsters who Corrupted him. He would make a good ally.”
“If we bump into him again, we’ll have a chat.”
Tom ducked under a low-hanging branch with finger-like appendages. Flick swung his pickaxe and broke it in half so that it hung from its soft bark. The dwarf twisted the skin-like exterior until it ripped off, then chucked the branch as far as he could.
The branch grew back. For a moment, its bark was pure and brown and dimpled. But then the gray blight took it over, spreading to the tip and shriveling it like a dried carrot.
“This place used to be pretty,” Tom called out. He’d maneuvered his way through another cluster of trees with thin trunks and heavy dry underbrush—we couldn’t follow so we went around where there was more room. We passed a stout tree with thousands of branches and a fat, twisted trunk whose bark was bubbling with burls. I ran a finger across the rough surface, trying to imagine what such a beautiful tree might have looked like in better times. Before the Corruption came to choke the life from it. It had to be a hundred years old, at least.
The Grimm Chronicles, Vol. 4 Page 25